Celebrity dog whisperer wins £5million payout after being forced to shut down his kennels to clear the path for HS2
A celebrity dog trainer, Matthew Wiggins, has been awarded £4.9million in compensation after his high-end kennels business was forced to close to make way for the HS2 railway line. His company, WKD Trained Dogs Ltd, trained and supplied dogs to wealthy clients and celebrities, including Game of Thrones actress Indira Varma, from a Staffordshire farm that was earmarked for demolition by the Department for Transport in 2019.
Mr Wiggins had sought more than £8million in damages, arguing that years of uncertainty before the farm's compulsory purchase in 2023 damaged his business, harming staff morale and productivity even before the site was actually taken. Following a trial at the Upper Tribunal in London, deputy president Martin Rodger KC ruled the company was owed nearly £5million, agreeing that the looming HS2 threat had distracted Mr Wiggins and his team, particularly during the Covid pandemic, preventing them from maintaining performance.
- Dog trainer Matthew Wiggins wins £4.9m HS2 compensation payout.
- His Staffordshire kennels business closed after 2023 compulsory purchase.
- Tribunal found years of uncertainty harmed staff morale and profits.
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Matthew Wiggins ran a well-known dog training and kennels business from a farm in Staffordshire, working with wealthy and famous clients. When his site was identified for demolition as part of the HS2 works, he argued the years of uncertainty this caused, on top of the eventual loss of the property, damaged his company and its ability to operate normally.
The case was heard by the Upper Tribunal, a specialist court that deals with compensation disputes arising from compulsory purchase orders. Such rulings matter because they help establish how much businesses affected by large infrastructure projects like HS2 can expect to be paid, and how far compensation should account for disruption before land is actually taken, not just its loss.
Both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
Supporters of the award argue that when the state compulsorily disrupts a lawful, thriving business to build national infrastructure, fairness demands full and genuine compensation, not merely the value of the land taken. Years of hanging uncertainty over a company's future can demonstrably damage morale, staffing and performance long before any physical works begin, and the law's long-standing principle of "equivalence" exists precisely to put the owner back in the position they would have been in had the scheme never touched them. Denying recognition of these real, provable losses would effectively make private individuals and their employees absorb the hidden costs of a public project for the benefit of the wider taxpayer.
The case against
Critics take a different view, noting that HS2 is already vastly over budget and funded by taxpayers, so every payout of this scale, however legally justified, adds to a bill the public must ultimately bear. They point out that many businesses face market pressures, pandemics and uncertainty without any right to compensation, and question whether a high-end enterprise serving wealthy private clients should be treated as a special case deserving a multimillion-pound settlement. For them, the concern is one of proportionality and precedent: generous awards for speculative or hard-to-verify losses risk incentivising inflated claims and diverting scarce public funds from the project's core purpose.